Fishermen and Forecasts: How Barometers Helped Make the Meteorological Department Safer in Victorian Britain

centre for analysis of risk and regulation An ESRC Research Centre Fishermen and Forecasts: How Barometers Helped Make the Meteorological Department Safer in Victorian Britain Sarah Dry ESRC Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation The London School of Economics and Political Science Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE tel: +44 (0)20 7955 6577 fax: +44 (0)20 7955 6578 email: [email protected] DISCUSSION PAPER NO: 46 www.lse.ac.uk/collections/carr DATE: October 2007 Fishermen and Forecasts: How Barometers Helped Make the Meteorological Department Safer in Victorian Britain Sarah Dry Contents Abstract.......................................................................................................................1 Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................1 Introduction ................................................................................................................2 Designing a government fishery barometer................................................................5 Distributing barometers to fishermen.......................................................................11 Weather forecasts as dangerous knowledge .............................................................15 Local knowledge resurgent.......................................................................................20 Conclusion................................................................................................................24 Bibliography.............................................................................................................28 1 The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged. The work was part of the programme of the ESRC Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation. Published by the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation at the London School of Economics and Political Science Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE UK © London School of Economics and Political Science, 2007 ISBN: 978 0 85328 138 2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Printed and bound by Kube, October 2007 2 Fishermen and Forecasts: How Barometers Helped Make the Meteorological Department Safer in Victorian Britain Sarah Dry* Abstract In 1854, Admiral FitzRoy, acting as the first head of the Meteorological Department, initiated a project to distribute fishery barometers to poor fishing communities to help them predict poor weather. At roughly the same time, FitzRoy developed a controversial system of telegraphing weather forecasts to coastal towns to warn them of impending storms, the first of its kind in Britain. This episode serves as a case study in the role of tacit and formal knowledge in risk management and the construction of responsible users of scientific information. Rather than contributing to formal risk management in the new government office, the fishery barometers distributed by FitzRoy and the Meteorological Department were explicitly excluded from the wider project to map British and global weather. But by being excluded from the formal system, these barometers and their fishermen users were in fact able to contribute to the overall safety of the national system of meteorology. This study reveals that autonomous individuals can augment formalized risk management systems by remaining separate from them in key respects. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank those who have commented on earlier versions of this paper and the three anonymous CARR reviewers. * Correspondence: Sarah Dry, Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. ([email protected]). 1 Introduction Most Victorian fishermen were illiterate. When writing to request a fishery barometer from the newly established Meteorological (hereafter Met) Department, the men of Britain’s poorest communities relied on a local gentleman to draft and write the letter for them and many signed their names only with a simple mark. However, when these letters were received at the government office in Whitehall, they were submitted to an efficient system of review and annotation. In the standard manner, Admiral Robert FitzRoy, the newly appointed head of the office, noted on the back of the letter that the request should be acknowledged and, usually, an instrument supplied. Next to his notes the secretary duly recorded the date at which a barometer would be sent. Petitions such as these represent a rare point of contact between a group of poor and uneducated fishermen, largely unable to write, and the new government office, which was obsessed with written records of its own business and of the weather. The fulcrum between these two worlds was the fishery barometer, an instrument that both FitzRoy and the fishermen believed could contribute to the safety of men at sea. Roughly two feet high, the barometer featured a large, easy-to-read display plate and a sturdy construction that would suit it to a life of public exposure on the roughest parts of Britain’s coasts. By faithfully observing the rise and fall of the barometer, local fishermen would be able to predict storms that might have otherwise taken them by surprise, keeping them safe in harbour when the worst of the weather hit. In the mid-19 th century, fishermen wrote to the central government office because they too believed that the government instruments could help keep them safe. The relationship between safety and registration, which includes both the obsessive pursuit of registrations in the name of safety as well as their deliberate discouragement or mere absence, forms the core of this paper. This relationship is assessed through an investigation of both the cause and the surprising effect of the unlikely contact between a world of intense registration—that of mid-Victorian bureaucracy—and one of tacit or informal knowledge—that of mid-Victorian fishermen. The cause is the barometer itself, a product of the Meteorological Department, a specialized central scientific office. The surprising effect is that the subsequent contact between a system of bureaucratic control (not to say discipline) and a group of impoverished individuals who were quite literally the captains of their own ships did not result in the subordination of the latter to the former. Instead, as the remainder of this paper will demonstrate, the formal bureaucratic system came to rely on the informal one in important respects. Furthermore, this reliance was understood to further the safety of British fishermen and mariners and, perhaps even more significantly, the safety of the new government Meteorological Department itself. Put another way, this paper seeks to address a basic question relevant to risk studies more generally: what is the relationship between tacit knowledge (which by definition cannot be communicated through writing) and formal risk management practices (which are by definition based on written rules)? It is clear that there is often a significant gap between how risks are identified and planned for in formal risk assessment and managements systems and what happens in practice when adverse events, be they accidents, disasters or financial crashes, actually occur. Both sides of this gap have been investigated in the extensive risk literature, and 2 there are rich studies of both risk management in action and formal risk management systems. What has proved more difficult to analyse are the ways in which formal and tacit (also known as informal or practical) approaches can actually be seen to interrelate and to connect with one another. Aside from offering the intuitively attractive possibility of a more holistic vision of risk, linking these as-yet-distinct genres may help eliminate the lingering deficit-model that still taints some studies of individual responses to risk while enabling a more realistic vision of how individuals, and organizations, actually respond to risk. Acknowledging that public knowledge can be, and is, constituted through the contributions of many kinds of knowers, which includes people such as fishermen, farmers, and local inhabitants as well as scientists, is one way to eliminate the implicit binary (and hierarchical) division between expert and lay knowledge that dogs so many public and scholarly debates over risk. On the face of it, the government meteorological office and the fishermen were united in their interests. Both were committed to the same thing: the safety of sailors at sea. Indeed, the government office had been founded for the very purpose of keeping British mariners safe. In 1854, following an international meteorological congress held in Brussels, Parliament sanctioned a vote of £3200 to the Board of Trade and £1000 for the Admiralty to establish a “uniform system of meteorological observations at sea” in order to help determine the “very best tracks for ships to follow in order to make the quickest as well as safest passages.” 1 The Met Department was established soon afterwards. But while the safety of sailors and fishermen (as well as the efficiency of sea voyages) was paramount, the official remit of the office was to gather meteorological

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